


At Your Service

by aurilly



Category: Atlantis (UK TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-27 22:12:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5066326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pythagoras is destined to bind himself to a hero. But which one?</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Your Service

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spock/gifts).



“I only came to ask advice about my brother,” Pythagoras said. “I didn’t ask for…” He waved broadly around the dimly lit, cavernous space. “All this.”

The Oracle remained shrouded in shadow, looking not at him, but into her bowl, as though he didn’t matter at all.

Which, not coincidentally, was exactly the case, as she had just told him.

“What we are meant for is not usually that for which we ask,” she said.

“So, when is it supposed to begin?” Pythagoras asked, and with each word, increasingly derisive scorn edged his tone. “My great destiny to pledge myself wholly to some other man. A pledge which I am to divulge to no one, and suffer with in silence?”

“Soon,” she said, either not hearing or not caring about his displeasure. “But do not despair. You may not suffer as you expect. Who knows? You may even find it quite pleasant.”

“‘Who knows?’ Who, if not you?”

She ignored the question, as she had so many others, instead choosing to continue intoning into her bowl. “You will be two halves of a whole, bound to one another by the foretelling of destiny, as an axis against that very destiny.”

“That is an illogical construct,” Pythagoras argued, hoping that he could rationalize his way out of this fate without offending the gods. “A thing cannot both contribute to and detract from an outcome.”

But not even the elegance of logic could move her, for she swayed and mumbled, “You will either prosper together, or all of Atlantis will fall.” She finally looked up at him, and the glint in her eye that suggested she perhaps did possess a sense of humour after all. “Good luck.”

That appeared to be all she intended to say, so, a few minutes later, Pythagoras took his exit.

He slowed during his descent on the steps until he’d stopped moving entirely. He took a seat right there, forcing the traffic to flow around him, like an obstinate rock in a stream. This news was a lot to take in. He knew better than to deny the gods their chosen prey, but it _was_ rather hard. Pythagoras considered himself too young, not the heroic man of destiny at all, and yet, here he was—young, skinny, weak Pythagoras, chosen specially for something larger than himself and terrifyingly unknown. Between Hercules and his research and some confusing feelings he’d recently been experiencing, Pythagoras had more than enough to deal with.

Eventually, the priests scolded him off the steps and on his way. Pythagoras paused when he reached the other end of the temple’s wide square. Three possible directions lay before him, each promising a different offering for the evening. To the left lay the road to the tavern where Pythagoras was certain to find Hercules, and where he could expect a night full of drunken talk and beetle races. Straight in front of him lay the road to their house, where he could spend the remaining daylight hours in peace, working on the proof he’d started earlier that week. To the right lay the road to Daedalus’s house.

His mind was still deciding when his feet veered right of their own accord.

* * *

This was the first time Pythagoras had simply dropped by unannounced, especially at a meal time. He arrived with apologies at the ready, but Daedalus shushed him and Icarus pulled him into a warm embrace that made Pythagoras completely unable to pretend he’d come here solely for a fatherly presence. 

Towards the end of dinner, Icarus winced as he accidentally bit down on an insufficiently picked out olive seed. Still, despite his pain, it was _he_ who asked, with deep concern in his wide brown eyes, “What troubles you, my friend? You are not yourself tonight.”

Pythagoras shredded his pie crust, making a mess of crumbs at his end of the table. “I am not at liberty to say.”

“Is it city business? If you—”

“No, it is nothing like that. I do not wish to discuss it. I came here so that I wouldn’t have to. I was hoping you might distract me.”

Icarus’s face fell. “Since when have you kept secrets from us?”

Pythagoras thought back to his conversation with the Oracle, and about the fact that soon he would have to keep more secrets from friends like Icarus and Daedalus. But he also thought of the secrets he had already been keeping—the secret that made him unable to meet Icarus’s eyes for too long, lest he give himself away. 

“Well, I have something to distract you,” Daedalus said, breaking the moment. “Both of you.”

He launched into an explanation of an investigation he was making into dew points and temperatures. It wasn’t precisely in line with Pythagoras’s pet subjects, but listening helped to take his mind off things. And, even when he wasn’t feeling half as glum and hopeless as he did today, he had never been one to turn down the opportunity for a scientific experiment. He said as much. Icarus groaned.

Almost as distracting as the idea of the experiment was the way Icarus kept glancing at him. Pythagoras kept checking to see if he had squirted olive juice onto his tunic. 

“You’ll have to spend the night on the roof. Here is the equipment.” Daedalus said. He dumped a pile of delicate measuring devices into his son’s waiting arms.

“I’m game if you are,” Pythagoras said to Icarus. 

“My participation was never open for discussion,” Icarus grumbled. “My life has ever been one long experiment. But the task will be more pleasant in your company.”

* * *

“Pythagoras. Pythagoras.”

Someone was whispering into his ear and nudging his shoulder. Terribly annoying behavior that, in Pythagoras’s experience, belonged to only one person.

“Hercules, go away,” he mumbled, throwing an arm over his face. “You are a nuisance and a pest. Draw the curtain on your way out.”

“I should hope I smell too nice to be mistaken for Hercules,” was the laughing reply.

“Icarus?” Pythagoras opened his eyes to find Icarus staring down at him with a smile twitching across his face.

They lay on the roof of Daedalus’s house, with Icarus wrapped around him. Flashes from the previous night flickered behind his eyes and in his muscles. Icarus had smuggled a few flasks of wine to the roof along with the equipment. Pythagoras rarely imbibed, but there was else little to do during such a theoretically fascinating yet procedurally dull experiment. And after his interview with the Oracle, he’d decided not to care, and not to think… about anything, if only for one night. He decided to Hades with responsibility for one night; wherever Hercules was, he could take care of himself, just this once. Pythagoras would do just as he wanted.

Which was always going to be a dangerous proposition with Icarus around, because Pythagoras hadn’t known what to do with this want since he’d identified it some weeks before.

“You still have that terribly serious look about you,” Icarus had said, as they pointed out constellations and quizzed one another about their meaning. “The longer this night lasts, the more I worry about you. You look like a man in need of a good public holiday. When was the last time you had any fun?”

Pythagoras couldn’t remember, but it hadn’t mattered, because he’d been having fun _then_ , enjoyment marred only by the reminder that one day soon, he likely wouldn’t have any going forward. He had wondered who this other person was, what he would be like, and what he would require of Pythagoras. 

But then Icarus had nudged him and handed him for cake, and told him to stop thinking so much.

Huddling together as the night grew colder and colder, laughing… The more his vision had blurred in the moonlight, and the more he tried not to think of the future he didn’t want, the more the object of what he _did_ want had become clear.

Pythagoras wasn’t certain how it had started—how much should be attributed to his accidental but spectacular trip and fall right into Icarus’s lap, or to his awkward eagerness to help Icarus clean the wine he’d spilled all down his front. Perhaps it hadn’t been any one stimulus. They had been on this course for ages, almost inevitably. But, no matter how or why it had started, Pythagoras remembered quite clearly how it had finished.

He flung his arm over his face again, pretending to shield himself from the sun, but really to hide the panic that he was certain lay behind his eyes.

“Are you always this cranky and dramatic in the mornings?” Icarus asked. _He_ seemed perfectly unflustered, worse luck. 

“No,” Pythagoras protested. “Only when I have gotten too little sleep, only to have it interrupted by people poking and yammering at me.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Icarus replied, laughing again. Maddening. “Normally, I would have let you sleep, and watched in fascination. I swear, watching you has been better than most of the things Father has sent me to observe over the years. I’ve never seen someone contort themselves into such positions. You look like a human corkscrew.”

“I....” Pythagoras struggled to tell if that had been meant as fondness or criticism. He winced again, because there it was: the change that loomed. He’d never before had to worry about what Icarus meant.

“You said you and Hercules had an early appointment for a possible job,” Icarus continued, handing Pythagoras his tunic from where it had gotten tossed at some point during the proceedings. “I didn’t want you to be late on my account.”

“Oh! You’re right.” Pythagoras sprang to his feet and began pulling his clothes on while Icarus grimaced at the equipment, parts of which had been broken by that clumsy fall.

“We muffed the project,” Pythagoras said. “But the fault was mine. I will explain to Daedalus.”

Icarus raised an eyebrow. “I hope not in too much detail?”

“No, only the, er, relevant facts.” 

“Do not worry. I shall tell him I did it. He already thinks me an idiot. Yet one more disappointment will make no difference.”

Pythagoras had many dismayed things to say about such a statement, and many holes to poke in this argument, but he was in a terrible rush. From the angle of the sun rising over the hills, he could tell he had only minutes to get home and wake Hercules if they were to make their engagement. If they were late, they would be without money for the next week. He finished lacing his shoes and strapped his knife back to belt. He had to run, but felt that _some_ acknowledgement of what had passed between them was necessary.

“Icarus, I…”

But Icarus waved him away with a smile. “Go on, don’t be late. I’ll see you soon.”

Pythagoras was no coward, but he was secretly glad for a reason to flee. He hadn’t actually had a plan for the rest of that sentence. 

By the time Hercules emerged from his room, stretching and groaning, Pythagoras was sitting at the table, as though he’d been there all the while.

Hercules must have come home too late and too drunk to notice Pythagoras’s absence, for he said nothing except a grumbled, “Why on earth do you look so cheerful at this hour?”

Pythagoras was already flushed and hot from having run madly across the length of the city, so his blush did not show. “It is a lovely morning, is all.”

* * *

Given that _he’d_ been the one chosen as a sacrifice to the gods, Pythagoras could be excused for initially thinking the ‘Ordeal of the Minotaur’ had been all about him. But as the days and weeks passed, and as he began to notice more and more the specialness of the strangely ignorant foreigner he and Hercules had welcomed into their home (well, less welcome and more resignation on Hercules’s part), he began to wonder…

Pythagoras grudgingly had to admit that Oracle had not been wrong. If he was meant to pledge his life to someone, there were worse possible options than Jason. He _did_ find spending time with him pleasant. Far from being an imposition, Pythagoras was happy to look after Jason, and felt no need for any praise or notice for it. Aside from all the tramping around the forest, lunatic schemes, and babies in the home, it wasn’t even that difficult. It mostly involved a lot of secret research—and research was something Pythagoras was always happy to do. 

His understanding from the Oracle was that Jason was not to know exactly how much Pythagoras did for him, nor how responsible he was for the successful outcome of some of what Jason thought were solo ventures. The Oracle reiterated this on the occasions where research failed and Pythagoras was forced to request from her a trinket or spell from the depths of the temple’s knowledge to get them out of some scrape. But Pythagoras’s heart was large, and growing daily; he did not mind languishing in the shadow of another’s star. 

(He preferred the shade anyway; he burned rather easily in the sun.)

Life with and since Jason meant that Hercules got into even more scrapes, from which it was Pythagoras’s self-appointed job to rescue him—both of them. Not to mention Medusa, for whom he had spent the past few days trying to find a place to live. With all of his new responsibilities, Pythagoras found himself, as expected, with little time for his personal research. There was little time for anything that was his alone. With everything going on, Pythagoras was too busy to spare a moment for a visit to Daedalus’s house. 

That was what he told himself, at least.

They had left it unaddressed; he would leave it that way, as though it had never happened. Icarus likely wouldn’t mind. 

That would be the best outcome, Pythagoras reasoned.

* * *

Between Medusa occupying his bed, Jason’s and Hercules’s nervous pacing, not to mention his own worry for their friend, Pythagoras hadn’t slept or eaten in days. He walked in a daze, and collided with someone just outside the entrance to the royal library. But when he tried to scuttle back and apologize for his absent-mindedness, lithe yet strong arms pulled him into a long, tight hug. 

“Are you going inside?” Icarus asked, as though no time had passed, nor anything changed between them.

Pythagoras decided to follow Icarus’s lead. This was what he had hoped for, and decided to be the correct course of action, was it not? He squashed that irrational pang of disappointment. “Yes.”

“What is it today? Circles?” Icarus asked teasingly. 

“No, it is not for me, but rather for a friend. A grave matter indeed.” Pythagoras briefly explained the situation, and what he hoped to find.

“Well, I am glad to see you,” Icarus said at the end, “though I wish the circumstances were more pleasant. Come, let us go in.”

“But aren’t you just coming out?”

“I can continue the research I was doing for Father, or else help you with yours.”

Icarus spoke to the guards and used his father’s influence to get Pythagoras access to the rarest section of the library. Although his stomach roiled with nerves, Pythagoras knew he was lucky to have run into his friend. As Daedalus’s son, Icarus knew even more about what Hercules liked to call “physician-y things” than Pythagoras did. If anyone could help him find a cure for what ailed Medusa, it was Icarus. He even knew the library even better than the more naturally studious Pythagoras did. It was he who found caches of relevant scrolls on a shelf that Pythagoras would never have thought to check. 

They sat side by side between two shelves, far from the very few other patrons. They whispered, trading stories and catching up on what they’d been doing since the last time they’d seen on another. It turned out that Icarus had been away, called to finish a deal with someone on the far side of the island. All this time Pythagoras had spent feeling guilty for not paying a visit, Icarus had spent feeling guilty for leaving in too much of a rush to send word. 

The afternoon felt just like the old days, Pythagoras reading about logic and lore, and Icarus ticking off answers to questions on a list his father had prepared for him. Pythagoras felt so guilty, sitting here happy and relaxed in his own private oasis of scrolls, while Hercules worried himself sick and Medusa was possibly dying. He felt guilty for enjoying himself, even though he was working.

“You’re famished, aren’t you?” Icarus said, and dug through his satchel of notes for an apple. “I know that glassy-eyed look of yours, as well as that attitude. Here, have this. When was the last time you ate?”

Pythagoras thought as he chewed. “I cannot say.”

“Two housemates and still no one to look after you,” Icarus sighed. “Good thing you have me.”

“Do I?”

“Of course. And I hope that once your friend is well again…”

“Yes, of course,” Pythagoras replied, answering no question in particular.

However, Icarus had rarely let him off that easily. He scooted in closer, giving all the signals that would make it easier for Pythagoras to embolden himself. “‘Of course,’ what?”

It still wasn’t enough. “Well, what were _you_ going to say?” Pythagoras asked.

“I was going to say, when your friend Medusa is well again, I would like to see you. Both at the house, and… above it. As we did that night. Is that what you were agreeing to?”

“Yes,” Pythagoras said.

* * *

“And where were you last night?” Hercules asked a few days later, when Pythagoras came running into the house.

“I… I lost my way home in the dark and fell asleep in an animal pen,” Pythagoras lied.

“Ah-ha!” Hercules exclaimed triumphantly. “Now I am not the only one.”

“But unlike you, I do not intend to make it a habit.”

Hercules tilted Pythagoras’s head up to better see his neck. “Ah, the goats must have nibbled at you in the night. Isn’t that how it always happens?”

“Yes, certainly,” Pythagoras absently agreed.


End file.
